To Tell or Not to Tell, That Is the Question
June 24th, 2010 | Categories: Online | 7 CommentsI have always toyed with the idea of making this blog known among my offline friends and acquaintances. While I’ve never kept this blog a secret from my offline counterparts, I’ve never come right out and talked about it, either. I mean, I wouldn’t lie and say I didn’t have a blog and/or I am not the person behind this blog if they somehow discovered it, but blogging has never been part of any of our conversations and I’ve always just left it at that. My strategy was always unless I got outright asked about whether or not I had a blog, there was no need to discuss it.
Recently, this internal debate about whether or not to “reveal” (for lack of better term) this blog to my offline life has become a more timely issue, since I will be going abroad all of next year. Lots of kids have travel blogs they use as a way of keeping friends and family updated about their travels; I’ve been asked whether or not I’ll have a travel blog of my own. The idea of creating a travel blog as well as maintaining this one is more than I’d like to have on my plate when abroad. Since it’s never been an option for me to abandon this blog, abroad or not, I’ve been thinking whether or not I just share this blog with the offline world.
I have always written this blog with the mindset that if someone offline discovered my blog and/or I decided to open up about it by linking to it on my Facebook profile, there’d be nothing for me to hide. I don’t slag off specific people, air dirty laundry or reveal secrets that I wouldn’t reveal offline. When I talk about work, family and friends, I’ve always been guarded. (Hey, I don’t want to get dooced.) With all that in mind, what, really, is keeping me from publicly acknowledging that I have a blog that I regularly update and (I hope) is at least semi-interesting?
I guess it’s the fact that this blog, for all purposes offline, is a relatively private outlet. If I tell people about this blog and they read it when I’m abroad, chances are they aren’t going to stop reading it when I return. I guess that’s where the area of contention is for me. There’s no guarantee that anyone in my offline life will follow my blog at all but once they know about it, they aren’t going to forget my blog exists.
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Hi, I'm Manda. I'm a college student studying communications and languages. I like to read, shop, bake, and travel. I have a tendency to listen to my favorite songs on repeat for hours on end. Sometimes I catch myself thinking in a language other than English. 
Yeah, whether or not to “reveal” my online blog and identity has always been a question on the back of my mind. Like you, I won’t ever deny anything if people found out, but I’m not going to go out of my way to tell them about it either. Not that there’s anything they can’t read on my blog or Twitter or whatever, but I’m just so used to it being my “online” outlet that I think it’d be weird if my real life friends started commenting on my entries, lol.
I suppose you could always tell a few close friends about this blog, which is what I’ve done. You know, people who you can trust :)
I like Jenny’s suggestion. Just tell close friends who you’d definitely be okay with reading the blog on a regular basis anyway, if you have friends you feel that way about. In any case, once you’re back, there is always the good chance that people might lose a little interest; your real-life friends might feel like it’s the sort of thing they already know about. I find that unless people write blogs themselves or are incredibly internet-savvy, they’re not quite as interested as keeping up with them.
My thoughts on this are pretty similar – I don’t really talk about my personal life too much in my posts (that’s more livejournal territory, which is set to friends only), so I wouldn’t really mind if people found out about it. But at the same time, I don’t tell everyone I meet that “Hey, I have a blog”. I’ve mentioned to my friends that I do webdesign, but only a couple have asked if I have an actual site.
I think a travel blog is a fantastic idea, though. If you are worried about people still reading this blog after you come back, you can always create a separate one at blogspot or at wordpress. I know you are hesitant about maintaining both, but you can always cross-post your entries. It’s the best I can think of.
I don’t think there is much problem with telling offline friends about having a blog, especially if you’ve never written anything you would feel you’d need to hide. Personally my friends know I am active online though we don’t ever talk about it and I have told only my closest friend the URL of my blog. It is a little wierd if she asks me about something I’ve written but not totally uncomfortable, as I tell her most things anyway and I trust her.
Though I agree with Marie. Having a seperate travel blog on a free service and cross-posting the entries over there might not be too much extra work.
i think it’s a touchy subject…
my blog is coming public on sunday on local tv.. or something like that.. it’s a mistake an IRL friend made when speaking about twitter apps for cellphones, since i’m one of the most active twitters in his stream, my picture appeard on air…
if i’m lucky not a lot of people will see it… but if i’m not… i’m screwed… just like that
Hmm yeah, once you tell people about your blog, you can’t exactly untell them if you realise you don’t want them reading it!
I don’t want RL people reading my blog, so I don’t tell them I have one. Of course, I wouldn’t deny it was me if they found it, because it would be blatantly obvious that it is me, but the chances of anyone finding it in the first place are pretty slim, so I don’t really worry about that.
Maybe you can cross-post your travel adventures to a separate blog?
[...] a happy medium with my “tell or not to tell?” dilemma regarding introducing my offline friends to this blog. There are still some kinks [...]